An effort to craft compromise net neutrality legislation failed after a key lawmaker refused to support the bill, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today. "This development is a loss for consumers and a gain only for the extremes," Waxman said in a statement. He added, however, that the decision announced today might not be permanent. "Cooler heads may prevail after the elections," he said.

Sued by Righthaven for infringing copyright by allegedly allowing a user to post five sentences from a lengthy Las Vegas Review-Journal article, the political site Democratic Underground is asking a judge to dismiss the lawsuit on the ground that it made fair use of the article.

Earlier this year, document-sharing service Scribd quietly rolled out the new feature Readcast, which broadcasts the documents people download to other Scribd users.

Despite the well-publicized privacy headaches that this type of feature has caused other companies, Scribd launched Readcast on an opt-out basis -- but has now reversed that decision, making the feature opt-in only.

Nearly two years after the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow the unlicensed use of the white space spectrum, the agency finalized the rules that will pave the way for what Julius Genachowski is calling "Super WiFi."

T-Mobile has answered EZ Texting's lawsuit by alleging that wireless carriers have no obligation to provide short codes because text messaging is not considered a "telecommunications" service subject to common carrier rules.

The U.S. Supreme Court indicated that it's interested in deciding when people accused of copyright infringement online can claim that they are "innocent infringers," subject to as little as $200 in liability.

In recent weeks, class-action lawyers have filed a handful of lawsuits against companies that allegedly use Flash cookies to recreate HTTP cookies that users delete. Already those lawsuits -- which have drawn much media attention -- seem to be creating public relations problems for the companies. But whether the litigation campaign will pose a legal risk to the online publishers and ad companies remains to be seen.

Copyright enforcement outfit Righthaven must have expected that its infringement lawsuits against small publishers and bloggers were sure wins. After all, in many cases the defendants appeared to have violated at least the letter of the copyright law by displaying significant portions of Las Vegas Review-Journal articles on their own sites. But a federal judge in Nevada just issued a decision indicating that Righthaven might face some obstacles in its litigation campaign -- an initiative that has so far resulted in more than 100 lawsuits against small publishers, bloggers, nonprofits and even political candidates like Sharron Angle. In every known ...

A dispute between mobile marketing company EZ Texting and T-Mobile landed in court this morning, with EZ Texting alleging that the wireless carrier is blocking all messages to and from EZ Texting's short code.